I'm not aware of any program that can read in the disks one by one.

There are programs that can find duplicates on multiple drives, but the drives have to all be hooked up at the same time.

See here:
https://www.techspot.com/article/1648-delete- … uplicate-files/

Not sure if there's an application that does this already. The auslogic duplicate file finder looks pretty good, but not sure if it'll find dupes across multiple disks, especially when they're not mounted at the same time.

It would be pretty straightforward to put together a script to hash all the files on each disk and populate a database with the disk #, filepath, file size, and hash for each file.

Mount each disk, run the program, and then you can group by size/hash and everything having a count of greater than 1 is a dupe.

How large are the drives? You can nix the offline cataloging if there's any possibility of copying their contents into one place. I used to have a Windows 3.1 program that found duplicates within a volume. Not sure if this is retro related or post-LFN / post-NTFS though.

Swiss File Knife. http://stahlworks.com/dev/index.php?tool=dupfind

Although it compares by checksum (i.e. content as well), so it won't be fast.

EDIT: failed to notice that you wanted the discs to be read one at a time; no, that won't work then. Unless you use one of the other SFK functions to output hashes/sizes/timestamps, a little like beastlike's suggestion, and work from there. Or if the drives are small enough so you can image them all onto a local drive (and mount the images as drives).

SirNickity wrote:

How large are the drives? You can nix the offline cataloging if there's any possibility of copying their contents into one place. I used to have a Windows 3.1 program that found duplicates within a volume. Not sure if this is retro related or post-LFN / post-NTFS though.

They're old (IDE old), one was 80GB, I can't remember the rest, but they won't be large, so your solution will work, thanks. I was sure there'd be pre-existing programs to do what I wanted, but apparently not (unless they're very obscure, nowadays). Anyway, thanks for the replies, everyone.